Help With Episode? (A Hard One)
-
ecarle — 19 years ago(December 14, 2006 08:45 AM)
Sounds about right, I think I remember the sword. It was quite memorable.
There was also an episode that climaxed with a fight in a Chinese restaurant where one fellow ended up with a meat cleaver in the chest.
What I'm getting at: TV shows like "Peter Gunn" maybe didn't used to be as graphic and gruesome as today ("CSI") , but they had more of a head for violent action and the fatal dispatch of villains. A kind of casual approach to death.
Thanks very much, for the likely heads-up, telegonus.
I'm reminded of a TV crime show that played a few years after "Peter Gunn," called "Burke's Law," with Gene Barry. Like Craig Stevens in "Gunn," Barry was a suave "Cary Grant lite."
"Burke's Law" had several great gimmicks. One was the premise: Barry's Amos Burke was a Beverly Hills millionaire who just happened to be a Captain on the LAPD. Each week's show would open with the discovery of a body, then a cut to Burke at his mansion, romancing some gorgeous woman whom he would leave behind to drive to the crime scene in his Rolls-Royce!
The second gimmick: "Burke's Law" was a whodunnit, with a weekly "guest cast" of stars from which Burke would have to find the killer. The suspect mix was of old-time movie actors(Steve Cochran, Stephen McNally, Gloria Grahame) and newly minted TV people (Paul Lynde, Barbara Eden, the Smothers Brothers.) Ronald Reagan was a suspect once a TV used-car salesman like Cal Worthington. Each episode was called "Who Killed ?"
The third gimmick: if the killer turned out to be a man, Burke and that guy would usually engage in a big fistfight. It was funny as with Patric Knowles in the "Gunn" episode above, the killer could be a very wispy or older man (Billy de Wolfe, Reginald Gardiner as examples), but they would just put a stunt man in there and suddenly the foppish fellow would be punching out Gene Barry's stunt man with vicious abandon. Of course, Barry always won the fight.
Ah, those were the days: nothing like a good furniture-wrecking fist-fight to bring an episode to a satisfying end. They were legion; no killer gave up without a fight, sometimes to the death. Stunt men were fully employed. -
telegonus — 19 years ago(December 14, 2006 02:10 PM)
You're most welcome. For some reason I'll always remember Patric Knowles with those archaic weapons. Another show that had a lot of violence, implicit and explicit, was the 1960-62 horror anthology,
Thriller
, which featured such grisly deaths as a man ripping his face off in front of a mirror when he doesn't like what he sees; an elderly woman who turns out to be a witch torched by her family and sent screaming into the night; a young man killed by a hatchet in the forehead descending a flight of stairs in an old gothic mansion; and an unfortunate fellow kicked to death by a vengeful scarecrow. As you can see, this show wasn't for the faint of heart, and it still works if you can find some old episodes. The mood was often as tense as in
Psycho
, whose house, btw, figured in a few episodes, as the series was filmed on the Universal lot and used standing sets to save money. Most of the Bates house interiors were used used at one time or another, though I don't remember the fruit cellar ever showing up.
Yes, TV was more fun in those black and white days; better written and more imaginative.
The Outer Limits
was also outstanding, especially when a certain Mr. Stefano had a thing or two to do with it during its first season. Some of the episodes he wrote were extraordinarily good. I missed those days, especially those anthologies, a staple on network TV till they went all color in 1966-67, which ruined everything. -
ecarle — 19 years ago(December 14, 2006 04:17 PM)
The coming of color TV shows pretty much ended that whole sweet era (roughly 1957-1966) of atmospheric mystery anthologies, along with the William Castle-style horror films in theaters, which looked rather like "TV on the big screen".
This particular black and white era is own very flavorful "sub-genre," more contempo-modern than noir and, very good writers were hired to write it. "Psycho" was part of it. "Peter Gunn" (with that GREAT opening theme, rich, jazzy, exciting) was part of it. "The Outer Limits" was part of it.
"Thriller" was very much a part of it. I've seen some episodes on the U.S. Sci Fi channel. Karloff made an excellent host, and the way the screen would "crack" into a web around his face as he said, "This one's a realthriller," was part and parcel of the FUN of that era.
"Pigeons From Hell" had the guy with the hatchet in his head. Quite scary for TV.
And I did see a "Thriller" episode in which the interior of the Bates house was clearly used. The EXTERIOR was used for decades (and, I suspect, largely rebuilt over the years.) But this was a rare look at the foyer and staircase. Weird: by putting the interior in a different story with a different setting, one practically forgot this WAS the "Psycho" interior.
I can only guess that Universal eventually trashed that "Psycho" interior in the 60's. Studios tend to strike sets quickly. They're not history to the moneymen they take up space. Unless its like a "White House interior" set, needed for various political shows.
What replaced all that atmospheric 50's-early 60's stuff was the flat and tacky color of the "TV Movie of the Week" and "Rod Serling's Night Gallery." A few good ones "snuck through," but for the most part, those programs had a factory-built, clunky look that was only accentuated by poor 70's fashions, decor, and hairstyles.
And the fist-fighting violence of "Peter Gunn" (and "The Wild Wild West," and "The Man From UNCLE") was eventually ruled out of bounds in more peaceable times (somebody thought they helped create the atmosphere for assassinations and riots. Come on!). Today, that kind of TV violence has been replaced by gore and very realistic crime stories. Just no fun. -
telegonus — 19 years ago(December 14, 2006 11:09 PM)
I'm glad that a few other people remember that distinct era as fondly as I do. Hitchcock's show (or shows) were in that same period, gone just the year before the all-color era began.
One Step Beyond
and
The Twilight Zone
are from that period as well.
The mood of many westerns was similar to the thriller-anthology=detective shows, as with the black and white
Gunsmoke
, which was like western
noir
, with
The Rifleman
not far behind. Boone's Paladin was like a black-clad private eye of the sagebrush. Dramatic shows like
Naked City
and
Ben Casey
(but
not
Kildare) drew on that same mood; darkish, moody, lots of unbalanced people, weirdos who throw a monkeywrench into everything, an emphasis on the insulted and the injured of society rather than the rich and priveleged.
Agree totally about
Burke's Law
, a lighter version of the same thing, with the then new multi-guest star gimmick (and remember, always in alphabetical order). It sort of carried on the
Peter Gunn-Richard Diamond
tradition with, as you mentioned, that sleazy sixties "Rat Pack" feel, complete with the greasy-sounding brass in the opening music. That was an awfully fun show. I remember when it was being previewed by ABC and watching the first episode, altogether surprised to find that the usually loveable Bill Bendix was the killer!
Another important show in a darker but not dissimilar vein stylistically as the others was
The Fugitive
, which premiered the same year as
Burke's Law
, on the same network, and also featured a novelty: a protagonist on the run from the law, and for four seasons! Worth mentioning: the ratings for this one began to fall after the show switched to color, hence the fourth season cancellation (helluva sendoff episode, though).
Those movies of the week from the late sixties through the early seventies were sort of the anthology shows of their era. I always hated the movie of the week idea. It seemed stupid to call a ninety minute show a movie. Why not just make longer anthology shows? There were some excellent ones, though, but you're right about the tacky color, which made television in general so ugly in those years.
Night Gallery
tried to uphold the anthology tradition but Serling had little control over his material and the writing wasn't as good as in the
TZ
. The very idea of a Serling show in color seems wrong anyway. He was a guy who cried out for black and white, rainswept streets, pawn shops, newstands, pool halls and rooming houses. -
clore_2 — 19 years ago(December 14, 2006 02:35 PM)
Had Gene Barry chasing after Cesar Romero on the beach and neither used a pinch runner. The show was the first Aaron Spelling all-star guest list vehicle and was based on the first episode of
The Dick Powell Show
in which Powell played Amos.
It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me -
ecarle — 19 years ago(December 14, 2006 04:06 PM)
Yes, I saw that "Burke's Law" episode. I guess stunt men are more useful for fake punches and the like so nobody gets hurt. Barry and Romero were fit men at the time for running.
I have also seen the "Dick Powell" show pilot, and I do like to point out that "Burke's Law" was likely the BEST of the Aaron Spelling all-star shows, because the mystery writing was often quite good (people like Harlan Ellison and Levinson/Link contributed scripts) and the stars were rather directly tied into a particular "grade" of 1940's noirish near-B people (Steve Cochran, Stephen McNally) which gave the show a certain flavor. Somewhat bigger old stars like Betty Hutton and Lizabeth Scott also appeared.
"Burke's Law" was also rather racy for its time. Topics like sex, extramarital adultery, alcoholism, and drug use were hinted at,or even openly discussed. The show had a certain Rat Pack/Hugh Hefner early sixties sleaziness to it that was most atmospheric for a crime show perhaps more formulaic than "Peter Gunn," but in the same ballpark.
Paul Lynde guested three times and was the KILLER each time (but without fistfights, as I recall.) Best: the mystery was how was a magician shot to death when he was locked in a coffin in a swimming pool? Answer: his doctor, Lynde, did it, when he opened the coffin on land in front of spectators and checked the magician's heart ("This man's dead"). Silencer in his doctor's bag. Cool.
"Burke's Law" ran two seasons as a crime whodunit, and then somebody (Barry? Spelling? ABC?) turned the show into "Amos Burke, Secret Agent." Bad idea. Worse idea; no more all-star casts (maybe they were too expensive for the ratings received). The spy show tanked in less than a season.
Maybe I'll move some of these posts over to the "Burke's Law" board. It was a fun show. I'm not sure of DVD availability. I do know that the "TV Land" cable channel in the US showed the series about 8 years ago, which is when I caught up on it again. -
clore_2 — 19 years ago(December 14, 2006 05:31 PM)
It premiered airing on a Friday night, it followed the retooled
77 Sunset Strip
which now had Bailey working out of the Bradbury Building if I recall correctly.
Didn't Burke come back in the late 80s or early 90s?
It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me -
ecarle — 19 years ago(December 14, 2006 06:06 PM)
Yeah, they tried to re-do "Burke's Law" in the 90's. All-star cast suspects, again, but more modern. I think George Segal and Elliott Gould (sadly) made appearances. Gene Barry was still suave but white-haired and old, so they gave him a grown son to do the chasing and fist-fighting, etc. Of which, I think, there was less. It had a "Murder, She Wrote" vibe I think that was the actual greenlight-inspiration to bring it back.
I recall sampling a few episodes of the 90's version, but "you can't go home again." "Burke's Law" was indeed a Rat Pack era artifact, and the 90's version was rather sterile and plastic you couldn't really do "fun" anymore like that. The show lasted only one season.
In between the two "Burke's Laws," Aaron Spelling took another stab at the format with a detective show called "Matt Houston" in the 80's. James Garner-soundalike Lee Horsley played a multimillionaire detective, and the all-star whodunnit format was used for awhile before the show turned into a straight actioner without so many stars. I can only assume it was a budget thing.
Another gimmick: on the old and new shows, Burke would often utter some fortune cookie-expression, and then say "Burke's Law."
Like: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Burke's Law." OR: "When two people commit murder together, they get caught sooner or later. Usually sooner. Burke's Law."
SO:
Accept no substitutes: The sixties is when these shows matter Burke's Law. -
ecarle — 19 years ago(January 02, 2007 09:38 PM)
Rather than start a new thread, this seems like a good one to re-join the topic, as follows:
I've rented some of the Peter Gunn DVD's. 8 episodes per. Thoughts:- It looks like I won't be getting to see "Death is a Four-Letter Word" with Patric Knowles going Medieval on Peter Gunn anytime soon. It seems all they've got right now is the first season on DVD. The Knowles episode is in Season Three. Though I trust eventually they'll get all the episodes out. Somebody listening?
- "Burke's Law" was influenced by "Peter Gunn" in one big way. Most of the "Peter Gunn" episodes I have seen thus far open with a murder, often with a screaming witness, but sometimes not. And and this is the cool part the second after the victim dies, BOOM, we get the "Peter Gunn" theme song and cool-weird splatter-art background titles. Note: the theme doesn't open with its famous "throbbing bass chord lead in" it starts right on the muscular first melodic notes. And soon, Peter Gunn is on the case (just like Amos Burke would be a few years later.)
My favorite opening murder thus far has a carny magician opening a case and his beautiful assistant falls out dead into the camera as the weird magician's eyes bug out at her BOOM! "Peter Gunn" music and logo comes on. - The format of the show is surprisingly similar to "Have Gun Will Travel." A potential customer looks up Gunn at "Mother's bar" just as Paladin would be looked up at the Hotel Carlton in San Francisco, pitches the job and the pay, and we're off (both shows were 30 minute quickies.)
- But occasionally just like Paladin Peter Gunn takes a case for free, to help a friend, or a damsel in distress, or a penniless poor soul. Also like Paladin, the big-paying customers subsidize Gunn's pro bono work.
- Craig Stevens as Peter Gunn: an interesting contradiction. He's clearly indeed an all-American Cary Grant clone somewhat in looks (he even has a cleft in his chin), but definitely in VOICE, and Stevens rather seems to push a long vocal Grant-like drag on his lines, like he's doing an impression.
Gunn is tall and handsome and elegant but and this is where it gets interesting far more brutal and two-fisted in his fighting style than Grant ever was. Creator Blake Edwards seems to have come up with a bizarre hybrid that really WORKED Cary Grant as Mike Hammer. I've seen no episode on Gunn's back story, but the private eye seems equally well-versed in martial arts (I'm guessing a Korean War b.g) and meat-and-potatoes slugging. In a fistfight against a giant mute brute in one episode, Gunn seemed to make a "strategic fighting decision" on the spot clenching both hands together as if in prayer and beating his opponent with a "two-hand hammer" to the face. - Lola Albright as Gunn's lady fair, the beautiful bar singer "Edie Hart." They make a great couple the sexy chaunteuse who willingly loves a suave man who is thisclose to getting killed in every episode, sometimes with her almost getting killed, too, just because she's with him when the killers show up.
Since Gunn has a regular lady, the show can only "tease" about the other women coming on to him. He let's them usually to get information but he NEVER lets things get out of hand. He's a loyal guy. It add sexual tension to the tale. In one episode, however, Gunn seemed to almost fall for a female he was investigating until she was killed, and he extracted lethal vengeance.
In another episode, Strapping Offbeat Fifties Television Beatnik Dame Nita Talbot demands that Gunn take her to dinner at Mother's where Lola Albright has to sing and watch her man under amorous attack attack from another woman. This is an amusingly sophisticated scene (Gunn tries to convince Nita to dine anywhere but Mother's: "The food is lousythe drinks are watered downthe glasses are dirty.") - Herschel Bernardi as Gunn's long-suffering police lieutenant of a friend. This is a standard-issue private-eye show relationship (James Garner had that cop friend on "The Rockford Files"), but Bernardi plays his cop as the thin, sleek Gunn's interesting polar opposite: rather paunchy, sleepy-eyed, and shambling. Still, Lt. Jacoby gets Gunn out of a few fixes. They're truly a buddy team. (Bernardi would soon go on to voice "Charley the Tuna," who was never good enough to get caught on a fishhook and killed for a "Chicken-of-the-Sea dish," and felt bad about not getting chosen to die. Weird. A tuna death wish.)
- Modernly, our TV shows are pretty gruesome CSI and its tour of rotting corpse innards but the investigations usually lead to arrest and trial. Not so on "Peter Gunn." Most episodes end with bad guys dead, dead, dead. Usually shot, sometimes by the twos, threes, fours. Those were the days
- "Peter Gunn" was shot on the Universal backlot, and, it seems, on two exterior street sets, period. One street with some businesses (a street seen in "Harvey" and "Psycho" as well); one street with some brownstones.
-
telegonus — 19 years ago(January 07, 2007 12:14 AM)
Herschel Bernardi's Lt. Jacoby was sort of a precursor of Ed Asner's Lou Grant character on Mary Tyler Moore's show and later on Asner's own LG show. Bernardi was, though sloppy in appearance, hipper than Asner as a type, at least as I remember him. The Gunn show must have been in in its day a nice alternative to all those "juvenile" Warners detective shows of the same period. Craig Stevens, like Lloyd Bridges, parlayed some two decades of being a minor Hollywood movie player into becoming a genuine TV star. Though many have commented on Stevens' resemblance to cary Grant, physically and vocally, I get Fred MacMurray vibes, too, as I can easily see MacMurray doing a movie version of the show. BTW, as I recall, PG was shot on the MGM backlot for a season. At least that's what some of the credits read.
-
clore_2 — 19 years ago(January 07, 2007 03:43 AM)
Asner inherited the role of Jacoby in the 1967 movie which seems to have disappeared.
Craig Stevens would go on to having starred in two series in the 1964-65 season - the syndicated
Man Of The World
and
Mr. Broadway
on CBS.
It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me -
telegonus — 19 years ago(January 07, 2007 10:53 AM)
That's right. I forgot about Asner as Jacoby, or maybe remembered it unconsciously. Bernardi is my preference, though. I remember Asner in the role and didn't care for him. Good actor, but too mannered. Bernardi was more of a natural.
-
ecarle — 19 years ago(January 08, 2007 09:42 PM)
Fred MacMurray as Gunn? An interesting concept, but surely the toughness of his "Double Indemnity" character (and the surprising sexual suaveness of his villain boss in "The Apartment," who threatens Jack Lemmon with a Gunn-like "You dig?") would give MacMurray a shot at it.
I believe MacMurray was also the first choice for Perry Mason?
Too bad MacMurray elected to go the "nice dad" route in "My Three Sons" instead, but then we never knew exactly what that dad DID, did we? (Sell insurance? Murder people?) No, wait, he was an engineer. It was Beaver's dad we knew nothing of.
Craig Stevens had a body that was perhaps a bit too tall and thin to match Cary Grant it was more of a "Jimmy Stewart stringbean look." And alas, nobody was QUITE as handsome as Cary Grant, as his many TV knockoffs demonstrated (Stevens, Gene Barry, Robert Wagner, etc.)
But Stevens did get Grant's voice down perfect on "Peter Gunn" (in a far more subtle manner than Tony Curtis' comic gig in "Some Like It Hot"), and I wonder:
Shortly after hitting with "Peter Gunn" on TV, Blake Edwards got to work with the REAL Cary Grant on "Operation Petticoat" as a director.
Perhaps Cary Grant was impressed with Edwards ability to "recreate him" as a TV character?
Peter Gunn is definitely cooler than the Warner Brothers shows (which were syndicated on cable a few years ago). Meaner and tougher,too.
Herschel Bernardi' Lt. Jacoby is, indeed, a rather special character. His character plays the guitar in his squad room office, and suggests a rather Jewish-Bohemian world-weariness that makes this cop different. You figure maybe Jacoby digs having the cool and WASPY Peter Gunn as a friend.
The credits say "Peter Gunn" was filmed at Universal (though there is no Revue tag at the end) but looking at more episodes, it is possible that the MGM lot was used sometimes.
Some episodes of Peter Gunn use this one "block of houses neighborhood" that has a house that looks rather like the "Psycho" house, but on a block with other homes.
This block is where Cary Grant crashes his car early in "North by Northwest," which was filmed for MGM.
Hard to tell how these different studios were used for different shows. Loan-outs? -
telegonus — 19 years ago(January 08, 2007 10:17 PM)
The problem with MacMurray was that he was at fifty a bit long in the tooth to be playing a suave, sexy private eye. Ten years earlier, in a movie version, of
Peter Gunn
he'd have been perfect. I'm glad that Raymond Burr got the Perry Mason role, which which gave him a level of stardom he'd in all likelihood have never been able to achieve otherwise.
PG
was unique as a private eye show, by far the most sophisticated of its era, though the Four Star-David Janssen
Richard Diamond
was a decent show in its way but not so stylish as the Edwards
PG
.
As to the studio business, that's a tricky one for those early TV years. Prior to Desilu's purchase of the RKO lot its shows were filmed various places. I believe that Four Star and Jack Webb's company shared a lot, or so I've read, though I believe that the early series that Dick Powell and Webb produced were filmed all over town, as they used to say. The Universal lot was used a good deal in those days, and the Columbia's Screen Gems series used that studio's lot, and indeed their fifties shows are visually suggestive of their mid- and low-budget films from the same era, right down to the lighting.
That cool jazz
noir
look of
PG
, not a million miles from the Warners
77 Sunset Strip
, was like the death knell for the older
noir
style one associates with fedoras double-breasted suits and brownstones. I've discussed this with Clore before, and we both believe that between them these two shows set the stage for the later Frank Sinatra detective films of the sixties, with their palm trees, convertibles and high rises, plus the Dean Martin spy Matt Helm spy series, also from the middle and late sixties. By that time movies had changed a good deal since the Bogart and Ladd days. As you mentioned in your
Burke's Law
post, one has to add the Hugh Hefner influence as well, indeed, the whole nine yards of the sixties-for-the-unhip-and-middle aged, as much a part of the era as SDS, bra burning, folk rock and mescaline, though not talked about nearly so often. One often forgets that during that tumultuous decade there were Bob Dylan
and
Andy Williams, Julie Christie
and
Raquel Welch.
The Sound Of Music
and
Midnight Cowboy
. But I digress
. -
ecarle — 19 years ago(January 12, 2007 08:06 PM)
It has been rather funny to grow up "away from the sixties" and see how that cosmic decade is treated now.
The Rat Pack who were considered so cool and suave (if not really THAT sophisticated) in the early sixties were rejectedly rather ruthlessly when the counterculture music came in.
But somewhere around the 80's, the Pack Came Back, and they've remained an influence ever since with SOME parts younger generations. The long hair, tie-dye shirts and love beads of 1969 may have been necessary to take a piledriver to years of repression, but Cool is Cool.
I also take your point that different cultural references in the sixties could co-exist at the same time. Example: Hollywood was turning out many Giant Musicals in the Late Sixties to try to make "Sound of Music" money, even as "Easy Rider" and its spawn played down the street.
"Peter Gunn" and "Burke's Law" rather reinvented noir for the time of Playboy pin-ups and the Pill. "Tony Rome" was a rather decent last gasp for this sort of thing (I post on it over at its board), but even Sinatra got tired of trying to pull off the same stuff in the late sixties. Tellingly, Sinatra quit "Dirty Harry." Had he made it, it probably wouldn't have had any sequels -
telegonus — 19 years ago(January 13, 2007 09:15 AM)
It's funny how historical eras acquire and maintain their images (or "images"). The 20's has the Gatsby-speakeasy-Charlestown thing going for it, yet nearly half of America lived on farms and in rural areas in those days. Did Amish folk engage in taxi dancing or Vermont farmers drink gin out of hip flasks? Unlikely, but this is how we view the decade, and there is of couse
some
validity to the popular view of the so-called Jazz Age.
When people talk or write about the sixties I have to smile. Yes, some of it's true, sometimes more than some of it, but it's a big country, and not everyone under thirty was smoking dope and dropping out, or even most people. Eventually the so-called sixties lifestyle did trickle down, so to speak, but that was after 1970, in the "dazed and confused" 70's. That's when you began to hear of teen pregnancies in Sioux City and cocaine use in small town high schools across the country.
Okay, back on topic (sort of): Walter Disney's movies and TV show were big business throughout the sixties. Totally anti-hippie and anti-countercultural, retro in appeal, deeply, unapologetically "square". I remember even as a teen hearing that Disney stock was about as sure a thing as there was in those days. It just kept on rising; as with Microsoft and Cisco in the 90's, you just couldn't go wrong if you bought Disney. And this was when Disney was just a movie-TV studio and cartoon factory with just
one
theme park to its name, Disneyland, in California.
Peter Gunn
and later,
Burke's Law
, were sort of bridges between the 50's beatnick jazz era and
film noir
, suggesting a hip future of equal parts Hugh Hefner and Raymond Chandler. This never quite happened outside of Hollywood, but it was a pleasing aesthetic while it lasted. In the end it was just a fad, but the Rat Pack did take notice. Their films, and Sinatra and Dino's later ones, were like dupes of the real thing, though; more daring in conception, they lacked the sophistication and stylishness of the originals. As far as TV was concerned, this was much more the era of rural comedies of the
Beverly Hillbillies-Green Acres
sort and big westerns focusing on ranches and families. There was a "Camelot blip" in the first half of the decade. You can see it in certain popular shows of the period,
Route 66, The Defenders
, the Casey and Kildare seriesbut these were gone by mid-decade. An interesting bridge between the "alienated 60's" and noirish TV:
The Fugitive
. This was TV
noir
with a vengeance, and a damn good show in the bargain. It began near the end of the JFK era, ended in 1967. The show was/is very evocative of its time; its ambiance really captures the wanderlust-soul searching side of the decade, managing to capture, stylistically, something of the spirits of Jack Kerouac
and
Diane Arbus. Not too shabby for a weekly TV show. The series' star, David Janssen, had some of the Cary Grantish good looks of Craig Stevens and Gene Barry, but in a very different context. His Richard Kimble character was like Grant's Roger Thornhill from
North By Northwest
, stuck in that cornfield,foreverpursued by crop dusters on a weekly basis. -
ecarle — 19 years ago(January 13, 2007 09:45 AM)
The Fugitive was a good show with an idea that had been advanced by "Route 66," the main character travelled the country and effectively hosted an "anthology series" in which different stories would be related each week.
"Route 66" would likely not play today without a fair amount of snickering: the show was about two guys, friends, who travelled the country together in a sports car, rooming together most of the time on the road. A male couple could be friends then, but today different connotations apply.
The Fugitive had just one guy travelling the country. And the Hitchcockian "wrong man" theme to power it on Dr. Kimble was running from the police while chasing the one-armed man who REALLY killed his wife and the show came to a ratings climax in August of 1967, when Kimble finally caught up with the real killer and fought him on a tower high above Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica, with the nemesis cop Girard shooting the villain down. It was a ratings milestone, and a very odd one today: the final episode of a long-running show appeared in AUGUST? That's TV rerun dog days, today.
David Janssen was Cary Grant-like (suave, cool), but he also had a bit of a Clark Gable thing going,with his big ears, his macho manner, and his growly voice. It was all-purpose TV star charisma,and Janssen had a smallish movie career, too (the 1967 private eye noir "Warning Shot" is very Peter Gunnish I remember Janssen's quiet last lines to a villain who thought that Janssen was training a toy gun on him "It's a real gun," Janssen calmly replied. The other guy pulled his gun. "It's real," Janssen said one more time. The other guy aimed his gun. Janssen then shot him, as if in resignation. His gun WAS real).
I remember being amused to see Janssen becoming best friends in the 70's with then hard-rocker Rod Stewart; the two men were real womanizing party animals and Stewart was a pall-bearer when Janssen died young of a heart attack rumored to have some roots in his hard-partying ways.
Indeed, no decade really probably matched in real-life what the "take" was in media. I remember living in a suburb with a lot of short-haired, white tee-shirt wearing guys when the "hippie craze" was on TV and the movies,and we joked: is THAT what the late sixties were going to be shown as in the future? As it turned out,yep.
Moreover, decades don't begin and end neatly. The fifties continued on roughly to JFK's assassination in '63, though the "late fifties/early sixties cusp" was fairly cool and modern, with Peter Gunn, "Anatomy of a Murder," "Some Like It Hot" "Ocean's Eleven" and "Psycho" setting the pace.
The countercultural sixties went some distance into the seventies, probably ending with Nixon's resignation in 74 and Vietnam's end in 75. Then came disco.
Speaking of which: a few days after viewing these "Peter Gunn" repeats, I stopped in amusement on a TV channel showing an old "Charlie's Angels" episode. This one was from thick in the disco era, and had our jiggling girl detectives chasing a bad guy with EVERYBODY on roller skates into a "roller disco" for a final shootout and capture.
It was atrocious, and the memory came back: it was as if all that cool, bleak noir of the fifties and early sixties had given way to the most bubble-headed, blown-dry silliness in TV detective work imaginable in the 70's. At least on TV. -
telegonus — 19 years ago(January 13, 2007 09:17 PM)
Believe it or not I remember that roller disco episode!
I didn't watch the show much but that one sticks out. The 70's was such an airhead decade for TV, especially considering how much good stuff there was in the previous two decades. The angels were considered hot back then, probably wouldn't be today. Farrah got the most mileage out of the show, though she's aged badly. Of the later ones only Tanya Roberts had the goods IMO, but her crudeness as a person rather ruined her striking looks. I hear her do commercials for Las Vegas junkets on the radio and her voice is irritating as hell.
Route 66
seems in limbo now. Almost but not quite fifties and too straight and moralistic (some of the time) to be truly sixties.
The Fugitive
is heavy sixties. Its "city" episodes capture the urban mood of the time to a tee. Their tone weirdly anticipates that of the movie
Midnight Cowboy
, with all those cheap diners and blowsy women; the walk-up apartments in then abandoned cities, now million dollar condos.
Janssen managed to be retro and hip at the same time. He was a regular guy, almost a generic Hollywood leading man in some respects yet he had that vulnerability, the slurred diction, the haunted
and
hunted look, that made him a kind of touchstone of the era. Like so many big TV names of the sixties his career lost steam later on. I think of Rowan and Martin, Dick Van Dyke, Barbara Eden, Richard Chamberlin.
You're right about the 60's sensibility lasting into the early 70's, but post-Woodstock-Manson-Altamont-Kent State things were different. Then the draft was abolished, or rather modified, with the lottery, and then that was abandoned, which took a lot of steam out of the counterculture. 1970-73 was a "limbo" period similar to 1960-63; superficially it seemed as if the previous decade's culture would just roll on, but in each case things came to a stop gradually. The 60's tone began in earnest between JFK's assassination and the arrival of the Beatles on our side of the pond, late '63-early '64. I think of the 70's beginning to settle in gradually with Watergate in the spring of '73, then gaining a head of steam through the Nixon-Ford transition, finally flowering with the
Jaws
-Springsteen-disco spring and summer of '75. But these are pop cultural and personal references. Others would surely disagree. I think we can all agree that the eighties began with Reagan's election in November, 1980. It took a couple of years for the decade to catch fire, but by '82-83 one could feel a new era dawning. Disco was gone, Belushi was dead, night-time soaps were all the rage on the tube; Prince, Madonna and, especially, Michael Jackson, were all making waves. God, I hated that decade. I grew up in the 50's-60's era, became a grownup, rather quickly, in the early 70's, and could relate to those years, but the Reagan era took me by surprise. It went over my head. I never got it and still don't. -
ecarle — 19 years ago(January 13, 2007 10:17 PM)
We are of similar generations and roughly of the same attitude, it seems, about these timelines.
The "boomer" generation sometimes takes hits for its "infatuation" with the 50's/60's/70's, but I think we were young enough to experience the 80's and 90's pretty well too, and they were simply a more straightforward couple of decades that the three that came before.
The fifties were "pregnant with the sixties." You can see it in "Peter Gunn," which had a number of amusing episodes featuring the "Beatniks" who would pave the way for the hippies.
The sixties werewell, the sixties. A great big explosion necessary to evoke massive change. A few assassinations, riots, Vietnam, the Beatles, civil rights for races and sexeswe were on our way.
American movies changed on November, 1968, when the ratings code allowed cussing, nudity, fake sex and ultraviolence where once none of those had been allowed except that filmmakers had been pushing hard for this kind of freedom since the fifties on.
In 1968, American television was caught in a weird "time warp" TV censorship remained even as the movies were set free, and so suddenly movies went roaring off into hard-R directions while TV still showed "Mayberry RFD" and "The Brady Bunch" and other such things. Even the most risque jokes on "Laugh In" paled to what could be said and done in "MASH: the movie."
Movies got more violent in '68, but political pressure turned TV shows LESS violent. U.S. Congress hearings looked into "TV violence" The wholesale killings of "Peter Gunn" , "The Untouchables" (admittedly long off the air in '68, but re-running in some places) and their ilk were forbidden; the violent "Wild Wild West" (fisticuffs and karate, mainly, but endlessly) was taken off the air. "Gunsmoke" no longer opened with Matt Dillon gunning down an opponent; now he just rode his horse on the prarie.
No room here to cover the variations on TV show types in the 70's and 80's and beyond. Suffice it to say that once the paroxyms of cultural revolution had been shaken off in the 70's, TV moved rather rapidly to the production of cookie-cutter entertainments. There were about 25 major cop/detective shows in the 70's, but none of them sported the nasty, brutish cool of "Peter Gunn."
Modernly, TV often looks as good as movies ("CSI") but the gratutitously violent fantasy noir world of "Peter Gunn" is long gone.
My memory isn't too deep on "The Fugitive," but I feel confident in saying that its kind of show character-driven and focussed more on drama than action isn't really so "doable" today. We need more flash and sex and "heat" on the TV screen nowadays than a more dramatic series like "The Fugitive" could provide. In fact, it just hit me: they tried a new "Fugitive" a few years back, and it died the same year that the first "CSI" on the same network HIT.
"Fugitive" tidbit: in 1965, Martin Balsam won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for "A Thousand Clowns." He gave an interview about how the Oscar wasn't really going to change his plan of getting acting where he could find it. His next role: guest star on "The Fugitive."
Those were the days. An Oscar winner immediately signs up for a TV guest appearance?
P.S. David Janssen was delightful as a rumpled private eye on the short-lived "Harry-O" of the 70's.
P.P.S. Remember how producer Quinn Martin tried to duplicate the success of his "Fugitive" show with a new twist?: It was called "The Invaders," and starred Roy Thinnes as a guy who saw an alien spaceship land and travelled from town to town every week, trying to run from the human-form aliens and convince anybody about the invasion. But "Fugitive"-like dramas occurred. -
telegonus — 19 years ago(January 14, 2007 09:41 AM)
To keep this thread somewhat focused on TV, I wholeheartedly agree about thge cluelessness of that medium, especially during the counterculture era. I've joked about this with Clore often over the years. Movies moved, in their own way, more in sync with the times than television. Even anodyne musicals like
Dr. Doolittle
and
Camelot
each in their way represented something larger than themselves. In the former case, one can see the fondness for nature, albeit in a light, Hollywoodized form, that would eventually evolve into the ecology and Green movements; while in the latter Richard Harris looks awfully cool in his droopy way, and the whole old Celtic-British tone had its folk and rock correlatives, in, for instance, Donovan's more esoteric songs and albums, and of course the Tolkien craze was just starting around that time as well. Young film-makers on both sides of the pond were
very
aware of the "youth movement", more so in Europe than here, but we were getting there, albeit slowly, as seen in Francis Coppola's often hilarious
You're a Big Boy Now
and, a couple of years later,
Putney Swope
.
As to the small screen, well, there were such super-relevant personalities as Carol Burnett, Jim Nabors and Mike Douglas, and cutting edge fare like
The Flying Nun
and
Petticoat Junction
. When TV tried to "go mod" it was pathetic, literally
The
Mod
Squad
! Yet that show did well, lasting several seasons. Such victories, such as they can be called, were pyrrhic in the long run, as the less hip the medium got the more young people kept away.
Bonanza
and
Gunsmoke
both lasted into the 70's, but by God by that time the only people who watched them were middle-aged or ultra-straight young people,
not
the kinds of people the networks were aiming to keep glued to the tube. For me, TV became irrelevant around 1965-66, with the switch to all-color. We'e discussed this before but it's worth bringing up, as this shadow line would define the medium for many years to come. Non-west coast big cities were out, palmy suburbs were in. Arguably most sitcoms, going back to the fifties, were filmed in Hollywood, but they weren't necessarily set there.
Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver
and many others were deliberately set in a kind of Middle American "netherworld", maybe Cali, but maybe also Ohio or Pennsylvania. Even many dramatic shows were a little fuzzy as to locale. I never quite "got" where Doctors Kildare and Casey practiced. Maybe it was L.A., but it could just as easily have been Chicago or New York. By the late 60's Cali ruled.
Mannix, Ironside
and
Marcus Welby
were all obviously filmed
and
set there. So were
The Name Of the Game
and
The Bold Ones
. Even shows that were more vague as to where the action was taking place, such as
The FBI
, had that Cali sensibility. Small wonder that two shows that managed to find younger, somewhat hipper than usual viewers,
Mission: Impossible
and
Star Trek
, were as often as not set in far off places; in the latter's case very far off.
No, there were no
Peter Gunn
-like shows in this period. That cool jazz thing was considered almost old-fashioned by the end of the 60's. The nearest thing to that was, oddly, the later incarnation of
Dragnet
. Producer-star Jack Webb was a big jazz fan, and straight arrow type though he was (on camera anyway), he had an obvious fondness for the down and out and the eccentric, as one can see in his line-up of "usual suspects". His deapan way of interrogating a nervous hotel clerk or an apathetic hobo was priceless. Those shows hold up very nicely. Webb was himself was west coast as you can get, but he had his own take on L.A., quite different from the Martins and the Spellings. The mainstream guys went for stucco homes, swimming pools and shopping malls, while Webb, though he often visited such places, seemed to have a greater fondness for railroad yards, seedy motels and out of the way eateries and watering holes, like a Cali Edward Hopper.
As to the networks, they cancelled, as the saying went, every show with a tree in it in 1970-71, which paved the way for the new kinds of shows one associates with the 70's. That was a huge opportunity for Norman Lear and MTM to strut their stuff, as they didn't have to compete with rural sitcoms. The sitcoms were the best thing on the tube in the 70's, and the only shows I watched. Those elderly-fat-eccentric detective series didn't do it for me. The writing was atrocious, the settings always the same. There was a Quinn Martin
uber alles
feeling to all of them, regardless of whether QM produced them. Yes,
Columbo
was different, several cuts above the rest, but it too had that generic L.A. mood. It had some of the uniqueness of
Peter Gunn
, but lacked the atmosphere.
Kojak
was New York, but though I liked Telly Savalas as a bad guy I didn't care for his arrogant, lollipop sucking detective. Also, I found the angry ethnic, "it's about time" aspect of the 70's, whether in movies or on the tube, alienating. Okay, by all me